8 Books to Read Before Visiting Pakistan: A Local’s Picks

Start with The Nine Lives of Pakistan by Declan Walsh. Of everything I’ve read about Pakistan, it does the best job of explaining the country to someone who’s never been.

Most of what people outside Pakistan know about it comes from the news, and the news rarely tells you what everyday life is like, why the politics work the way they do, or what makes the north so special. A few good books can fill in a lot of that before you arrive.

I grew up in Lahore and I’ve read every book on this list. Funnily enough, the two I’d put at the top were written by outsiders, an Irish journalist and an Irish travel writer. The rest are my favourites by Pakistani writers, who show you what’s harder to see from the outside: family, class, faith, weddings and what it’s actually like to grow up there.

They’re in order of my favourites. You’ll find two books on politics, four novels about everyday life, a memoir, a classic piece of travel writing about the north and, at the end, one popular book I’d skip.

1. The Nine Lives of Pakistan by Declan Walsh

Politics

If you only read one book before your trip, make it this one. I’ve read it twice, and it’s the first book I recommend to anyone going to Pakistan.

Declan Walsh reported from Pakistan from 2004 to 2013, for The Guardian and then The New York Times, until the government gave him 72 hours to leave. The book tells that decade through nine people he got to know, including the human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir, Nawab Akbar Bugti, a tribal leader from Balochistan (Pakistan’s largest province), and a Karachi police officer who was later killed.

He takes you all over the country, from Karachi and Lahore to Balochistan and the tribal areas of Waziristan on the Afghan border, and fills in the history as he goes, right back to Partition (when British India was split into India and Pakistan in 1947) and how far Pakistan has drifted from what its founder (Jinnah) had in mind.

It reads like a set of stories, it’s fast, and the storytelling is brilliant. By the end, the politics actually make sense.

The con: he doesn’t predict where Pakistan is heading, so you finish with questions and have to make up your own mind. If it leaves you a little nervous, my guide to whether Pakistan is safe for women gives you a local’s view.

Best for: first-time visitors who want the big picture in one book.

📚 If you only read one book before Pakistan, make it The Nine Lives of Pakistan. I’ve read it twice, and nothing else has helped me make sense of the country’s politics quite like this.

2. Where the Indus Is Young by Dervla Murphy

Travel writing

One winter in the 1970s, the Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy spent three months walking through Baltistan with her six-year-old daughter Rachel and a pony. Baltistan is the region around Skardu, so if Skardu is on your itinerary, this is the book to pack.

Taking a six-year-old into the Karakoram, one of the highest mountain ranges in the world, in the middle of winter is honestly crazy. But the two of them are fearless, and Rachel turns out to be just as tough as her mum. Her running commentary is half the fun.

It’s written as a diary, so you feel like you’re right there with them, edging along crumbling paths high above the Indus and crossing what’s left of old avalanches. Murphy shows how hard life is for the Balti people, and her respect for them and the landscape comes through on every page. She’s also curious about the region’s politics and religion, including how Partition cut Baltistan off from its old trade with Ladakh and Kashmir, on the other side of what became the India-Pakistan border.

It’s the same part of the north I travelled through on my own motorcycle trip, decades later.

The con: it was written almost 50 years ago, so it’s a snapshot of a different time, and you’ll want Google open for the place names and local words. Getting around the north is easier now, but still not always smooth, as my story of getting stranded in Astore shows.

Best for: anyone heading north who loves slow, old-school travel writing.

📚 Pack Where the Indus Is Young for your trip north. Murphy’s adventures make the Karakoram even more fascinating.

3. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Novel

Over one evening at a café in Lahore, a Pakistani man called Changez tells an uneasy American stranger his story. He went to Princeton, landed a job at an elite New York valuation firm and fell for a woman called Erica. Then 9/11 happened, and his place in America started to shift.

At its heart, it’s about the fragile and increasingly tense relationship between the US and Muslim South Asia, and what happens to it when neither side has much empathy for the other. Hamid’s point is that fundamentalism can take hold in the most unlikely people when they feel pushed into a corner. He never glorifies it, but he shows you how it starts.

Changez draws you in from the very first page, and at under 200 pages it’s tight, with no rambling. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007. If Lahore is on your list, read this one as the whole story unfolds there.

The con: you only ever hear Changez’s side of the conversation, and the ending is left open. If you like clear answers, that can be frustrating.

Best for: anyone who wants to understand how the post-9/11 years looked from Pakistan, in a novel you can finish in a weekend.

📚 Want a story that challenges how you see Pakistan and the West? Read The Reluctant Fundamentalist before your trip.

4. How It Happened by Shazaf Fatima Haider

Novel

This is the funniest book on the list. It follows the Bandian family in Karachi, told by fifteen-year-old Saleha, as her grandmother, Dadi (what you call your father’s mother), tries to arrange marriages for Saleha’s older brother and sister. Dadi swears by arranged marriages. Her grandchildren have other ideas, especially when Zeba, from a Shia family, falls for a Sunni boy. Shia and Sunni are the two main branches of Islam, and for Dadi that’s a very big deal.

What I love is how real it feels. Plenty of writers could describe the rishta process (finding a match for an arranged marriage), but Haider makes it genuinely funny, with scenes that are properly laugh-out-loud. You get all of it: the proposals, the family meetings, the endless wedding functions and old traditions like the bride seeing her husband’s face for the first time in a mirror. If you’ve ever been to a South Asian wedding, a lot of it will feel very familiar.

Underneath the comedy, she touches on the serious stuff too, like the obsession with fair skin, everyday sexism and daughters being treated as a burden. If there’s any chance you’ll be invited to a wedding in Pakistan, it’s a fun way to understand what’s going on around you.

The con: some of the jokes slide into body shaming that’s hard to laugh along with, and the characters are fairly one-dimensional, especially the strict grandmother and the rebellious granddaughter. It’s a light, easy read, so don’t go expecting literary fiction.

Best for: anyone who wants a funny, easy read about family life, and anyone who might end up at a Pakistani wedding.

📚 Get How It Happened for a laugh-out-loud look at Pakistani family life, complete with meddling grandmothers and wedding drama.

5. A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna

Novel

Tara grows up poor in Mazinagar, a village in rural Pakistan, where girls are married off to men far older than them and her brother Lateef is violent. Her mother fights to get at least one daughter educated, and that education becomes Tara’s way out. When she moves to Islamabad, she’s determined never to be poor or powerless again, whatever it costs her.

It’s gripping from the very first line and it moves fast, packing a lot into about 240 pages. Politics and history sit in the background the whole way through, and the social commentary is sharp.

What really drives it is anger. Every woman in the book is angry in her own way, and Tara’s hunger for more makes her almost impossible to hate, even when her choices are questionable. It’s also about motherhood across generations, and how you can never fully outrun where you come from.

The con: it’s dark. Misogyny and violence against women run through the whole book, and Tara isn’t always easy to root for.

Best for: anyone who wants to understand what life looks like for women in Pakistan, and how much class decides it.

📚 Want to understand women’s lives in Pakistan today? Start with A Splintering.

6. Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military by Husain Haqqani

Politics

I read this one recently with my family book club, after we realised how much of the history we learnt at school we’d forgotten, and how heavily that school version leans in Pakistan’s favour.

Haqqani, who later served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, traces how the state has leaned on Islam since 1947, both to hold together a country of so many ethnicities and languages and to define itself against India. The rivalry with India has also kept the army at the centre of power, shaping policy even when civilians are technically in charge.

He follows that thread through the big turning points: Pakistan becoming the first country to call itself an Islamic Republic, the 1971 war that ended with East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh, General Zia-ul-Haq’s 1977 coup (which the army codenamed Operation Fair Play) and General Pervez Musharraf dropping support for the Taliban after 9/11. His argument is that Pakistan has run on three things: Islam as the glue, India as the enemy and the US as the bank for the military. That formula has taken the country from one crisis to the next.

You’ll see the results everywhere you go, right down to what people wear, which I get into in my post on the Pakistan dress code.

The con: it’s dense, even more so if, like me, you mostly read fiction. It also came out in 2005, so the story stops in the Musharraf years.

Best for: readers who want the full political backstory and don’t mind an academic read.

📚 Get Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military for a deeper look at how religion, the army and foreign relations have shaped the country.

7. Kartography by Kamila Shamsie

Novel

Raheen and Karim grow up as best friends in Karachi, in families that are close in a slightly strange way. Their parents were once engaged to each other’s partners, and nobody will explain why the couples swapped. The answer goes back to 1971, the war that created Bangladesh, and the fact that Karim’s mother is Bengali, from what used to be East Pakistan.

It’s one of the most romantic books I know, a love story that never quite works out, wrapped around family secrets and the ethnic violence that tore through Karachi. When Karim’s family moves to England, he becomes obsessed with mapping the city’s streets, as if that could make sense of a home that’s falling apart. That’s where the title comes from.

Shamsie doesn’t stop to explain everything for readers who don’t know Pakistan, and I like that. A few Urdu words are dropped in, and you pick things up from context. It works as a history lesson and as a reminder that the past never really goes away.

If you’re basing yourself in Karachi, read it before you go, and use my day trips from Karachi to get out of the city once you’re there.

The con: the ending is a letdown. The big reveal feels underwhelming, and the book carries on for too long after it. The teenagers’ banter is also a bit too clever to be believable.

Best for: anyone who loves a slow-burn love story with history in the background.

📚See Karachi through the eyes of two childhood friends whose lives are shaped by the city’s turbulent history. Get Kartography.

8. Manboobs by Komail Aijazuddin

Memoir

This is a lesser-known one, and it’s on the list for a very specific reason. Most books about Pakistan are either about history and politics or about people from much poorer backgrounds. Komail Aijazuddin went to the most elite boys’ school in Lahore, the city I grew up in, so this is a world I knew closely: the same social class, the same circles. I’m not a gay man, but so much of it felt familiar.

It’s a funny, moving memoir about growing up queer and overweight in 1990s Lahore, raised on Western films and musicals and convinced that America was where he’d finally be accepted. It follows him to university in Montreal and New York just after 9/11, and through years of visas and green cards. He ends up too gay to fit in back home and too Pakistani to fit in as a gay man in the US, and learns that moving countries doesn’t make homophobia go away.

It’s also a good reminder that a lot of Pakistanis, like him and me, grew up deeply immersed in Western culture.

The con: the writing isn’t great, and the second half is much more about his life in America than about Pakistan.

Best for: anyone who wants a lighter, funny read and a side of Pakistan that most books skip.

📚Looking for something different from the usual books about Pakistan? Read Manboobs for a memoir about sexuality, identity and finding your place.

The one book I’d skip: Three Cups of Tea

Three Cups of Tea is still the book a lot of people read before going to Pakistan, and some of the top lists for this search still recommend it. In it, the American climber Greg Mortenson stumbles into the village of Korphe in Baltistan after a failed attempt on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, and promises to build the village a school.

In 2011, 60 Minutes and the journalist Jon Krakauer reported that parts of the story were made up. Mortenson denied any wrongdoing, though he admitted some events had been compressed in time. A year later, he agreed to repay his charity $1 million after an investigation by Montana’s Attorney General into how it was run.

For me, that’s reason enough to skip it. If you can’t tell which parts are true, you can’t trust the picture of Pakistan it gives you either.

Read Where the Indus Is Young instead. It’s set in the same region, and it’s an honest account from someone who walked through Baltistan with real respect for the people who live there.

Which book should you read first?

Start with The Nine Lives of Pakistan. Out of everything on this list, it’s the one that will make the most sense of what you see when you land.

After that, read the politics before you go and save a novel for the trip itself. Pick the one set where you’re heading, so you’re reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist in Lahore, Kartography in Karachi or Where the Indus Is Young on the long drive up to Skardu.

If you’re still working out when to go, my guide to the best time to visit Pakistan breaks it down by region and month.

Once your reading list is sorted, my guide to planning your first trip to Pakistan covers everything else you need to get there.